One of my personal Must Do holiday mani's has always been a nordic star sweater design. I'm not even sure how many years in a row I've done this style of design, but it has definitely been several. In my humble opinion, a nordic star design is peak Christmas sweater - and very often not even ugly. For this mani, I pulled out one of my all time favorite nail polishes, which I am now using as sparingly as possible as I'm pretty sure it has been discontinued, and paired it with a couple of different nordic star images to create a new version of this design. And, of course, I'm in love!

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Did I desperately want to do one of those adorably gnome designs that you see from professional nail tech's last year? Absolutely I did. Did I try and fail miserably at hand painting them? 100%. So this year, when I saw the Clear Jelly Stamper CjS-LC-100 Stamping Plate, which also featured some really gorgeous plaid stamping images, I just had to have it. HAD TO HAVE IT. Initially, I had planned on doing this mani in red, but in the end I decided to go with blue and let the gnome shine. 

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Every year at Christmas, I try to put together some mani's that aren't in traditional holiday colors - red, green, white, gold, blue, silver, that is - but I'm beginning to find myself thinking that shades of lavender are also becoming a little bit festive in my head. I wouldn't say that this mani is particularly festive, but I do think it's a really fun wintery holiday mani and I'm kind of in love with it. It also utilized layered stamping, which I've always been super intimidated by, and I'm kind of wildly in love with how that aspect of the design turned out. 

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Earlier this year, I did a mani featuring an orange gradient tip and even at the time I knew that I would be bringing back the look for a Halloween mani. I changed up a few things - obviously! - but there is definitely no denying where the inspiration came from. I really love designs that are sheer over the nail bed and then have an opaque gradient tip. Whether worn as is or paired with some stamping, I feel like it's super versatile and pretty much always looks great. 

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